Coffeescript/Javascript Is Not Working on Server

Question

I've implemented 'endless scrolling' feature, which users use to keep scrolling down if there are more posts to show. I followed Railscasts, and it works great locally (javascripts and will-paginate gem). However, on the server, this feature is not working. All I see is simple pagination, and endless scrolling is not applied. I think it's related to compiling or preprocessing because javascript is working fine locally.

I've tried running bundle exec rake assets:precompile locally, and deploying it. Also, I tried running the same command on the server as well. The problem hasn't been solved yet.

Does anybody have a good explanation for the problem? Related files are located as follows:

app/assets/javascripts/posts.js.coffee
app/views/index.js.erb

Assume the contents in the js files are fine because the feature works greatly on the local server. I am almost sure that the source of problem is compilation.

UPDATE:

from Rails guide about assets pipeline http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html

When these files(coffescripts) are requested, they are processed by the processors provided 
by the coffee-script and sass gems and then sent back to the browser 
as JavaScript and CSS respectively.

This explains about the line in config/application.rb

Bundler.require *Rails.groups(:assets => %w(development test))

only loads gems from the assets group in your development and test environment. 
This means that things like sass-rails and uglifier won't be available 
in production, which then means that you won't be able to properly 
compile/minify/whatever your assets on the fly in production 
if you're making use of those gems.

and in Gemfile, I have

group :assets do
  gem 'sass-rails',   '~> 3.2.3'
  gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 3.2.1'
  gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.0.3'
end

Does this mean that app/assets/javascripts/posts.js.coffee file wasn't compiled properly before being deployed and that was the problem?

Thank you very much in advance for your kind help.

If the issue is like you are thinking it is, you'll find information in your error logs. — deefour, Dec 12 '12 at 04:03
Deploy, tail your logs, and load a page that is experiencing the unexpected behavior. Watch you logs for an error. — deefour, Dec 12 '12 at 04:16
When you ran `rake assets:precompile`, `app/assets/javascripts/posts.js.coffee` is compiled to raw javascript and is then appended to something like your `app/assets/application.js` file through a Sprockets `//= require ...` line. The compiled/concatenated `application.js` is put into `public/assets` before your deploy. — deefour, Dec 12 '12 at 04:33

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:28

If this happens, try the followings:

Clear everything from public/assets folder in your local environment. In your rails root, run rm -rf public/assets
Clear out your browser cache, as it might be using your old assets: press ctrl+F5 or delete your browser history manually
Try restart your server a. cap deploy:restart (in your local terminal) AND b. sudo service nginx restart (in your server)
If #2 and #3 didn't work yet, now go ahead and deploy. cap deploy

Trying to solve the problem, I learned:

Assets are not supposed to be precompiled locally in general case; they are compiled during deployment, so you should not have to run bundle exec rake assets:precompile
It's not recommended to "compile on the fly" in production environment.
You do not have to change any default settings in config/application.rb.
You do not have to turn off config.asset.debug to solve this problem.

Read the following documents to understand better about the asset pipeline:

Rails/Bundler precompile vs lazy compile

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html

Coffeescript/Javascript Is Not Working on Server

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